When Tom Nakashima moved his studio from Washington, DC, to the Virginia countryside, he became intrigued by the giant piles of brush and trees he saw in the middle of cleared fields, silhouetted against the open sky in an otherwise unspoiled landscape. What initially caught his eye and set him to work was the interesting tangle of abstract shapes these heaps presented. But they also betray something ominous. Like that ambiguous terrain between city and country—the area the French call the banlieu, where the inhabitants are neither urban dwellers nor rural folk—these tree piles are the by-products